Installation

Configuration

An example configuration for KDM can be found at /usr/share/config/kdm/kdmrc. See /usr/share/doc/HTML/en/kdm/kdmrc-ref.docbook for all options.

You can visit System Settings > Login Screen and make your changes. Whenever you press "Apply", a KDE Polkit authorization window appears which will ask you to give your root password in order to finish the changes.

If you seem not to be able to edit KDM's settings when launching System Settings as user, you can use kdesu:

$ kdesu kcmshell4 kdm

In the pop-up kdesu window, enter your root password and wait for System Settings to be launched. Then go to Login Screen.

Note: Since you have launched it as root, be careful when changing your settings. All settings configuration in root-launched System Settings are saved under /root/.kde4 and not under ~/.kde4 (your home location).

Themes creation

Configuration file

The master configuration file is /usr/share/config/kdm/kdmrc. The default file contains comprehensive comments about the function of each item.

ServerArgsLocal

To force the number of dots per inch of the X server, add a -dpi option to ServerArgsLocal. A commonly used value is 96 dpi.

ServerArgsLocal=-dpi 96 -nolisten tcp

SessionsDirs

This variable stores a list of directories containing session type definitions in .desktop format, ordered by falling priority. In Arch Linux some window managers install such files in /usr/share/xsessions. Add that to the list in order to be able to select them in KDM.

Session

The Session variable is the name of a program which is run as the user who logs in.
It is supposed to interpret the session argument (see SessionsDirs) and start the
session as desired for that argument. One may wish to customize this for window manager
sessions, for example to set a wallpaper and start a screensaver. To do this in a way which
will survive pacman updates (which clobber Xsession) do as follows: